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There's nothing more glamorous than feeling that way, first and foremost. I feel especially glamorous when I can be trendy and chic by perfecting those beauty tricks for the latest craze that works for me and my life. One way I like to dazzle is through old vintage glam: bright lips and subtle eyes. I love dark reds and sizzling pinks and when wearing them, I feel as sexy as a pin-up. I belong in the "glamour world" when I wear my burgundy and cherry lips, as though this is an accomplishment set forth, achieved by age and the basic experience of growing up. This vintage glamour has withstood many fads and trends, through several cultural and social movements and hasn't easily subsided ...but if something new has come along to replace it, will it fade this time?
I came across a blog a few weeks ago on www.glamour.com, and have also realized inside the same-titled magazine, is gone are the luscious red lips, but newly arrived are the plump, yet barely there nude lips. What?! Why? My instant thoughts were that this new fad totally disregards old sought-after style that the fashionistas set before us to recreate and idolize. The vintage dark looks made us more bold, more fantastical, and more mature in our womanly ways. It was a milestone that came when a girl transformed into a woman wearing red lipstick. When I used to watch my mother putting on make-up, I would tell her I couldn't wait to do the same so that I could be a beautiful woman too. When this nude lip craze started, the look emphasized the complete opposite of the transformation of girl going to womanhood from womanhood rewinding to our youthful days.
Women are coming home from their seemingly glamorous lives to remove the lipstick as if to remove the stigma of being the ever talented mothers, wives, and working women, each role respective to those specific duties. The visionary stance of the highly sexualized look is disappearing. Instead of being classified as a woman by her lipstick, the look of the nude-lip depicts a new woman grown from both eras where women were expected to be homemakers and glamorous, to the age where the new-feminism movement began in burning bras and long straggly hair. The two worlds couldn't be any more different than birds and fish. Because we are women, we do have expectations we set for each other, that we are to be the best we can be both in our "glamour world" and in the real new age world. Perhaps this nude lipstick is a compromise to both worlds to which the carefully assembled looks from the 50s meets the carefree and natural phase from the 70s.
Today, bearing the carefully assembled nude lip represents all we have become through several decades of social movements. We can dream to be whomever we wish and while "glamour" has evolved into something we all can feel inside, no matter what we wear or how we look, the true glamour comes from being who each of us individually are...completely and wholly: mothers. Working women. Wives. Supporters. Advocates. Fighters. Teachers. Performers...everything we are, not just from what we are expected to do. We are glamorous, but damn it, also hard working and well-deserved name-makers. The gender gap, while still wide enough to matter, is slowly closing over time...a direct result of the old vintage "glamour world" and the neo-feminist "carefree world" coalescing into one world where women are both glamorous and feminist by evolution.
Does this mean that the red lips are out? Not exactly. Glamour doesn't necessarily depend on the latest trends and fads, but this new lip look is definitely an interesting take on how to look chic. Personally, I didn't like the nude lip look at first...it seemed too plain and too young. I did, however, make an attempt to try it and found that it takes less effort to perfect it, and less effort to maintain than the red lips. To rephrase this metaphorically, the new age encourages the perfection of oneself to be the best self one can be, while enhancing all the individuality and uniqueness without change. It is, after all, easier to be yourself than someone else that others want you to be... The red lips represent a society where the opposite rule applied. One has to apply the outline of perfection and apply the just the right shade of red for perfection. To maintain it is more difficult--one must
